Disaster 101: Protecting Your Personnel And Navigating Disaster Zones
As the busiest part of hurricane season approaches, many nonprofits and municipalities are giving away emergency kits so that coastal residents will be ready if a major storm hits.
Here at ALAN, we’ve been putting together a kit of our own. But instead of water, food or medical supplies, we’re populating ours with several action items/staples that logistics professionals should have in their back pockets immediately before, during and after disasters.
Want to know more? Check out this excerpt from one of the first installments.
Action Item One: Ensure Workforce Well-Being And Continuity
When a disaster threatens one of your company’s logistics operations, your top priority shouldn’t be protecting your facilities, equipment or inventory. It should be safeguarding your personnel – and not just because it’s the right thing to do.
Ultimately, the health and safety of your local supply chain is only as good as the workforce that supports it, which is why people-first disaster practices like the following are always a smart idea.
Having reasonable (and well-communicated) storm preparation times. Putting logistics employees in harm’s way is always a supply chain fail. Create a company-wide policy that gives most, if not all, of your personnel ample time to prepare, shelter in place or evacuate for a predicted disaster in their community as needed – even if it means closing an operation early or telling employees not to report to work.
Establishing multiple emergency management notification processes. When it comes to disaster warnings and updates, there’s no such thing as being too informed. Take the time to set up an SMS blast, mobile app alert or out-of-region check-in hub for all of your personnel. Better yet, deploy two or more of these things, because sometimes emergency notification channels can run into emergencies of their own.
Anticipating the need for workforce hardship relief. Even if your local facilities make it through a disaster unscathed, some of your employees may not be as fortunate. In light of this, consider pre-authorizing rapid emergency hardship stipends to help with unanticipated expenses like emergency hotel stays or evacuation fuel. Just as important, identify back-up team members from your other facilities who can be quickly brought in if some of your personnel need time off to tend to post-storm issues.
Mandating rest. Just because some of your personnel are willing to work 24/7 to help you ship critical relief supplies or restore product flow, that doesn’t mean they should. For safety’s sake, don’t let any of your drivers, warehouse professionals or other logistics team members work longer than 12 hours at a pop – and be sure to require rest cycles between shifts or loads.
Prioritizing psychological safety. After a disaster hits a community, your area supply chain employees aren’t just employees. They’re disaster survivors. While some of them may have little trouble returning to work and functioning at 100%, others may need some extra support and time. Make sure your employees know about any free counseling programs, helplines or other mental health programs that your company offers (you may even want to include this information in any internal disaster-related messages you send out). And if your company doesn’t offer these things already? Encourage your management to fund some of them as soon as possible.
Action Item Two: Improve Your Private-Public Interface
Whoever said “what you don’t know can’t hurt you” never tried to deliver products to disaster survivors.
While most businesses expect to encounter hurdles like damaged streets, flooded highways, and downed power lines, many are often surprised to run into another kind of roadblock: a significant private-public sector disconnect.
Thankfully there’s an antidote. By engaging in proactive practices like the following, you’ll help your drivers do a better job of navigating through the complex rules and regulations that go hand-in-hand with driving through government-controlled disaster zones.
Connecting with Business Emergency Operations Centers (BEOCs). Register with BEOCs well ahead of busy disaster seasons (like hurricane season and winter storm season) for access to real-time situation updates on curfews, road closures and emergency route priorities. It will save you the trouble of searching for these critical pieces of information yourself and ensure that your delivery teams are always working with the most current details.
Providing your drivers with physical re-entry credential packets. Don’t assume that your delivery drivers understand the finer points of access point protocols – or that they’ll remember to download every required document prior to getting on the road. Make it easier for them to get through law enforcement checkpoints by supplying them with pre-printed essentials like corporate identification, CISA essential worker documentation and priority bills of lading.
Making an early case for curfew waivers. You may think that specific supply chain facilities or routes should qualify for exemptions. But that doesn’t mean the officials at your Emergency Operations Centers (EOCs) do. By submitting details about these facilities or routes to EOCs as early as possible, you’ll increase awareness about why they are so important – and increase the chances that the waivers you’re hoping for will be issued.
Familiarizing yourself with transport escort protocols. High-priority freight like industrial generators and bulk fuel often qualifies for police escorts that will help get these items through crowded disaster zones more quickly. But “often” is the operative word. Reach out to state police forces directly to find out what their policies are – and to find out for yourself how to request this kind of assistance.
The Final Verdict
At the end of the day, resilient supply chains aren’t built on ironclad routes or high-tech dashboards alone—they run on the people making decisions under pressure. When you take care of your front-line teams and give them clear, practical pathways to communicate with local authorities, the operational side falls intfo place much faster.
Consider these pointers a down payment on your post-disaster playbook. We’ll be sharing a deeper dive into these strategies, along with expanded field templates and real-world case studies, in our upcoming iterations. Keep an eye out for it in your inbox, and let’s keep working together to keep goods moving and communities supported when it counts most.
Tough Questions:
Are There Any Easy Ways To Reduce Post-Disaster Confusion At Our DCs?
Whenever a disaster happens near one of our distribution centers, our supply chain turns into a huge mess. Are there any tactics that can help us do a better job of managing the chaos?
We feel your pain. Although most DCs’ dashboards, status reports and inventory management rules work great when times are good, many of them may not be sufficient or applicable during a disaster, when several additional constraints and contingencies need to be taken into account.
While time won’t permit us to list every way you should beef up your worst-case scenario SOPs, allow us to share three that should be relatively easy and inexpensive for your company to implement.
Thanks. We love easy.
So do we.
Our first recommendation involves your push inventory systems – and keeping the suppliers who are responsible for delivering that inventory in the loop.
Although you may think that these suppliers are aware that one of the facilities has temporarily closed or scaled back due to a disaster, that’s often not the case (especially if a disaster hasn’t received a lot of national news coverage). So make sure you consider pausing your replenishment deliveries as soon as your facility has been impacted. And don’t consider hitting the “unpause” button until local routes are clear and your area facilities have reopened.
Makes sense. Often our warehouses have been short staffed or so busy getting things up and running again after a disaster that the last thing they need is more business-as-usual inventory coming in. What’s next?
Using a quick 4P (People, Power, Property, Pathways) facility status report.
Once a disaster has occurred, various stakeholders will need a boots-on-the-ground view of how your operation and its people have fared as soon as possible. By using a standardized, checklist-like form like this that covers the current status of your people, power status, property condition and local pathways, your facility managers should be able to assemble and distribute such a report much more quickly – and update it as often as needed.
It looks pretty straightforward.
It is – and so is our third recommendation: Shifting to triage mode shipping rules.
We all want to get customer orders shipped on time. However, there are occasions when serving this high-priority group needs to take a back seat to things like helping area employees, shoring up facility safety and getting damaged DCs repaired.
You can help your personnel keep these priorities straight by creating and posting a disaster-specific shipping policy that clearly states which kinds of shipments and activities should take precedence over others — and when contingency shipping rules should kick in.
Can you provide any examples?
Of course. Check this one out, and feel free to modify it as necessary to meet your company’s post-disaster needs.
Any additional suggestions?
Plenty, which is why we’ll continue this discussion in future issues of this newsletter – and in our disaster toolkit. So watch this space. In the meantime, drop us a line on our website if we can be of further help.